Marshall McLuhan – philosophy

If you have ever visited the world Disney park, then you have probably listened to the song “it is a small world” while going on a water ride. If you have never had the song, the theme behind it is that people have common similarities and regardless of the country you are in we are all interconnected in one way or the other. The song was written in the early 1960s to bring out this concept, and it is also the time when the prediction of the global village was made.

Who was Marshal McLuhan?

Marshal McLuhan was a Canadian writer, media theorist and a philosopher. He was born in 1911 in Canada. He studied in different Universities before finally becoming a lecturer at Toronto University. McLuhan predicted about the global village in the 1960s. His prediction first appeared in his book the Gutenberg galaxy, and it was not received well by his colleagues. Nine years after he died, the internet was introduced, and it was then that people remembered his theories and started to show interest in them.

The late Marshall McLuhan came up with the term the global village in 1964 to show how the world’s culture is shrinking and expanding at the same time. He claimed the shrinking and expanding is caused by technological advances which permit the sharing of different cultures.

People believe that if the sharing of culture continues, it will lead to cultural globalization and the counties which are well developed will come to help the countries which are less fortunate. On the other hand, people are afraid that the emergence of a global village will lead to conflicts in various cultures or fragmentation of cultures.

McLuhan believed that the world was approaching a fourth “age” which he termed as the electronic age. In the electronic age, people would be able to obtain information through the use of technological tools. His studies on the trends in technology and how communication in humans was affected helped him to develop his hypothesis about the future and how innovations like the internet would affect people and their culture.